Re-Logic's 2D sandbox hit Terraria is heading to 3DS and Wii U in Q1 2016, publisher 505 Games has announced.

Both versions will feature touchscreen controls with online and offline multiplayer. The Wii U version will support up to eight-player multiplayer with four-player split-screen available. The 3DS version, however, is capped at four players total.

Oft likened to a 2D Minecraft, Terraria originally launched on PC in 2011 before being ported to Xbox 360, PS3, Vita, iOS and Android in 2013. It then arrived on PS4 and Xbox One last November.

Endless flyer Race the Sun is free today for PC, Mac and Linux on Steam.

This is in honour of developer Flippfly releasing the iOS version of its ambient score-chasing arcade game. You can snag that for £3.99 / $4.99.

Race the Sun also just received its Sunrise DLC. "This beautiful new mode has all the speed of the original but without a setting sun, an increasing difficulty, or a leaderboard," Flippfly noted on Steam. "Just settle in and zone out for one infinite region of bliss."

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1771389Thu, 30 Jul 2015 22:35:00 +0100Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons dated for PS4 and Xbox One

Starbreeze's fantasy adventure Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is coming to PS4 and Xbox One on 12th August, publisher 505 Games has announced.

A retail release will follow on 4th September in Europe and 1st September in North America.

This updated version of the acclaimed adventure will include a director's commentary, soundtrack and art gallery.

Game & Network Services, the part of Sony that includes PlayStation, saw sales increase 12.1 per cent year-on-year to $2.365bn for the first quarter of its financial year. That's the three month period ending 30th June 2015.

Sony said this "significant" increase was due to increases in PlayStation 4 software sales and PS4 peripheral device unit sales, as well as foreign exchange rates landing in favour of the Japanese company.

That's pretty great for a game that has yet to see an official release. Perhaps it's no surprise though, as Vlambeer has quite the following with the likes of Luftrausers, Ridiculous Fishing, and Super Crate Box under its belt.

Like other Vlambeer titles, Nuclear Throne's appeal is instant and gratifying. You select a creature then go about shooting every goddamn thing you can before it shoots and or eats you.

Editor's note: In accordance with our review policy, this is an early impressions piece based on our time with the first episode of King's Quest. Our final review will be live once the series has reached its conclusion.

It's funny to think that it wasn't so long ago that the idea of "episodic games" was a weird novelty, and pretty much unique to Telltale Games. So strong is that studio's imprint on the concept that it's only recently we've seen games - such as Life is Strange - start to strike out and find their own direction.

At first, it seems this long-awaited reboot of beloved 1980s adventure series King's Quest, which was once going to be produced by Telltale, might struggle to distinguish itself. Thankfully, developer The Odd Gentlemen has something more ambitious in mind, and the end result is a delightful and worthy reinvention of a neglected classic.

To click or not to click, that is the question. If you've been following Life is Strange thus far, you'll probably be keen to continue on with this pivotal episode on your own save and in your own time. But, if you're that curious or that impatient, and hey, I'm not here to judge, here's the first 16 minutes of episode 4 - 'Dark Room' - for you to watch. There aren't many huge story spoilers for those that have kept up to date with previous episodes, it's more like flavouring for everything to follow.

We'll be doing another spoiler-filled episode of our Life is Strange podcast in the not too distant future, so make sure to get the full episode played in the meantime. We have lots to discuss.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's final DLC, Reckoning, has been detailed prior to its 4th August release on Xbox Live.

PlayStation and PC versions will follow approximately 30 days later.

As expected, it includes four new maps along with the final chapter of the Exo Zombie saga with Descent. This will include the new Trident Reflected Energy Weapon along with actors Bruce Campbell, Bill Paxton, Rose McGowan and Jon Bernthal.

Journey. Perhaps the perfect word to define the trajectory of this particularly elusive PlayStation 4 remaster. Having briefly spent time with the game just last year at Gamescom, performance was solid enough that it seemed likely that a full release would follow shortly thereafter. Instead, nothing. Outside of the odd blog post, this particular port remained shrouded in mystery throughout most of its development cycle. Now, three and a half years after its original last-gen release, Journey has finally emerged on PlayStation 4.

Its technological underpinnings are based on an advanced iteration of PhyreEngine - a modular, cross-platform, free to license graphics engine created by Sony Computer Entertainment. It's an engine which thatgamecompany, creator of Journey, previously used in each of its PlayStation 3 projects. With its complex sand rendering, dust effects, and fluid simulation, Journey made extensive use of the PS3's SPUs to bring its world to life. With a small development house known as Tricky Pixels tackling this PS4 port, we were genuinely curious to see how this ambitious project would translate to Sony's latest console platform.

At first glance, this PS4 iteration appears to fully retain the beauty of the original game. The simple, clean designs, attractive lighting, and lovely sand simulation return alongside a nice bump in performance and image quality. Even better, it's available for free to owners of the original game thanks to the CrossBuy feature - if you bought the original and upgraded to PS4 in the meanwhile, the new remaster is sitting in your download list right now, just as it was for. We finished the remastered version of the game in one sitting and have to say that the experience was just as wonderful as we had remembered. However, upon closer inspection, we began to notice some rather subtle changes, suggesting a conversion scenario that was less straightforward than you might imagine.

If you've always loved Ico for its sparseness - the wind-blasted ruins, the empty space, the near total absence of an overbearing backstory - you probably had mixed emotions about this week's news that fans have datamined the game and discovered that the original script was far longer than the final cut. 115 lines of dialogue for an entire game is hardly chatty, of course, but Ico as we have it now is all about restraint, about the things that go unsaid or unexplained. Will Self has a wonderful word that's worth reappropriating for this kind of thing: under-imagined. It's not a criticism at all in this context (or in his original context), just an acknowledgement that if showing is better than telling, sometimes not showing or telling is better than both.

Ico's not the only game that we're learning more about long after the fact. Far more delightful is a recent story about Fallout 3 that suggests that, in order to create the effect of a player riding a subway train, the player was actually wearing the subway train in question. First-person viewpoints can hide an awful lot of fudging: the only thing that truly matters is what ends up on the screen, after all. We expect this trickery with cinema, where years of Behind-the-Scenes TV shows have meant that we now know that the rocks are polystyrene, the skyline is digital, and that, just out of view, the actors can see a bunch of ladders and lighting rigs and assistant directors drinking Frappuccinos. With games, it's a little different perhaps - more along the lines of the mutated spinal monstrosities that Crytek relied on to get crouch animations right for Crysis 2 - but the hidden world is still there, jury-rigged, Scotch-taped, and endearingly human.

The humanity of this stuff is what I find most fascinating: that hidden in the code you get traces of the people who made the game. It's everywhere in code, I gather: comments explaining how a thing operates, or why a thing operates in a very strange way, tacked inside everything from the stuff that controls cashpoint interfaces to the workings of an old NES cartridge. Normally we never get to see this, and that's fine. Because it means on the rare occasions we do get to see it, it makes all the more impact.

Randy Pitchford is showing me an email he received a day ago on his phone. In it someone asks the Gearbox Software boss whether Aliens: Colonial Marines, which came out in February 2013 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, will be remastered for PlayStation 4 or released as part of the PlayStation Plus subscription service.

"That exists, and we get those all the time," Randy tells me. We're in a bright and tidy room at the Hilton Metropole on Brighton's seafront. It's the end of day two at the Develop conference. We're doing this interview hours after Pitchford's keynote talk, in which he performed a few fancy card tricks (Randy was once a professional magician), discussed feedback from fans, positive and negative, as well as his motivation for game creation. He also mentioned he'd quite like to make another Duke Nukem game, but would probably need to partner with another developer to do it. Some headlines generated by the talk picked up on Randy saying some people who hated Gearbox's games were "sadists". That didn't go down well, as you can imagine.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1769815Thu, 23 Jul 2015 09:55:00 +0100Dishonored: Definitive Edition is half-off if you own the original

UPDATE 22/07/0215 10.30pm: This upgrade offer will also be valid on Xbox One, a Bethesda rep confirmed to Eurogamer.

As far as physical copies go, the rep told us "retailers will have trade in incentives as well. Folks should check with their preferred retailers on what those deals are."

ORIGINAL STORY 22/07/0215 5.06pm: Dishonored: Definitive Edition's PS4 version is half off its usual $40 / £30 asking price if you own the original game on PSN.

In Fallout 3's Broken Steel add-on, you repair then ride a Presidential Metro train. The bizarre image shows a character wearing a train carriage as a hat, suggesting when you ride the Metro in the game, you're inside a train car an NPC is wearing. That NPC, it suggested, would be running around underneath the tracks.

Arc System Works' anime-style fighting game BlazBlue Chrono Phantasma Extend is coming to Europe in 2015, publisher PQube has confirmed.

BlazBlue Chrono Phantasma Extend is the first BlazBlue to be released on the new generation of consoles (it's out for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), and includes 28 playable characters, as well as the stories from previous games Calamity Trigger and Continuum Shift.

An upgraded version of thatgamecompany's stunning sand-clogged adventure, Journey, has just been released on Playstation 4, complete with a host of improvements including 1080p resolution and 60 fps. It supports cross buy, so players who already own the game on PS3 can download the newest version for free.

If you still aren't sold, I've placed the native 720p PS3 version (upscaled to 1080p for the video) side-by-side with the brand new PS4 build in a graphics comparison video below. How many differences can you spot? Which version do you think looks best? What's your favourite Journey song? Let us know in the comments!

Just over three years since it was first released, and having become one of the critical darlings of the last generation, Journey is being re-released for PS4. Digital Foundry will be looking at the technical upgrade the game's received, and in the meantime here's Simon Parkin's profile of Journey's director, Jenova Chen, originally published in April 2012.

"There's this quotation from St Augustine..."

Jenova Chen puts down his hamburger and fixes me with a warm but firm stare. Trust the designer of Flower and Journey to invoke a 3rd century theologian as an entry point to the subject of online tea-bagging. "Augustine wrote: 'People will venture out to the height of the mountain to seek for wonder. They will stand and stare at the width of the ocean to be filled with wonder. But they will pass one another in the street and feel nothing. Yet every individual is a miracle. How strange that nobody sees the wonder in one another.'"

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1471956Tue, 21 Jul 2015 11:00:00 +0100WRC 5 gets a new trailer, and a new developer for the series

Fast cars! Dirty cars! Gravel in your face cars! The world of rally has always been fertile ground for games, and this year we've been treated to the welcome surprise of Codemasters' Dirt Rally, which is currently in Early Access as it works its way towards a final release. Let's not forget that other, officially licensed series, which this year sees a new developer parachuted in, and which has just received an all-new trailer.

You might not have heard of the new developer Kylotonn, a Paris-based outfit who were previously most famous for the Bet on Soldier series (no, me neither). But! They've been on something of a recruitment drive, and heading up the team for WRC 5 is Test Drive Unlimited 2's lead programmer and Simbin's former creative director. Now that's some heritage.

WRC 5 is out on pretty much every platform there is this October, hitting Xbox One, PS4, PC, PS3, Xbox 360 and the Vita.

Did Hideo Kojima know that Konami would one day remove his name from the marketing of his directorial efforts all the way back in early 2014?

An Easter egg in Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes suggests he may have predicted this fallout with his publisher at least a year and a half ago.

Captured by YouTuber timesplitter88, one of the unlockable trials for Ground Zeroes' Deja Vu mission tasks players with erasing the logos of every Metal Gear game directed by Hideo Kojima. By picking up a special gun you can omit these logos by shining a light upon them.

Due 14th January in Japan, this spruced up remake will arrive on PS4, PS3 and Vita. A western release has yet to be confirmed, but seems very likely.

For the uninitiated, Odin Sphere paved the way for Vanillaware's later Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Dragon's Crown. Set in a lavish fantasy world, Odin Sphere's ambitious story structure cast players as five different characters, each with their own campaign adding to the non-chronological story in a Rashomon-like capacity. As such, there was a fair amount of repetition in this otherwise inventive game, so a Vita version seems like a more palatable fit for one to chip away at over a long period of time.

That's if you already own the Kombat Pack. Otherwise he's sold separately from 28th July.

MKX marks the ninja's first appearance as a playable character in the Mortal Kombat series. Previously, he'd popped up in action game Mortal Kombat: Special Forces, and then in the Vita version of 2011's Mortal Kombat.

We're currently working on our analysis for Sony Santa Monica's remastered edition of God of War 3 for PlayStation 4, but in the meantime we thought we'd republish our original tech interview with the team, produced in the wake of God of War: Ascension's release and covering the development of both of Kratos' PS3 outings. Originally, this piece was published with a frame-rate analysis video of the spectacular opening level of God of War 3 on PlayStation 3. We've swapped that out with a new performance test, featuring both PS3 and PS4 versions of the game, compared head-to-head. That 1080p60 remaster we discussed with SMM at the end of this article, almost two years ago? Well - there it is.

As we reach the end of the current-gen console era, it's safe to say that it is the difficult, flawed, but ambitious PlayStation 3 that has offered up the most technologically advanced console games of the age. The complex hardware set-up may have banjaxed even the best third-party developers in its early years, but PS3 owners have been spoiled by a range of state-of-the-art gaming epics from Sony's own in-house studios - foremost amongst them, God of War creator Sony Santa Monica.

God of War 3 was a watershed moment in the history of the PlayStation 3. At the time, few believed that Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2 could be matched or even bettered in terms of sheer technological accomplishment, but Kratos' PS3 debut raised the stakes still further. The third game's legendary titan boss set-pieces looked and played with an almost CG-like level of polish, astonishing many with its breathtaking per-pixel lighting, rich detailing and pristine motion blur effects. The sheer scale of ambition on display here was simply breathtaking and even today, God of War 3 ranks as one of the best platform exclusives on the market.

Spare a thought for Denis. Brave Denis. Noble Denis. Dyslexic Denis? Persecuted Denis. With his centre-parted blonde hair, proud shoulder pads, and Wellington boots, Denis likes to boast that he only ever tracks his prey alone. That which he considers courageous only makes him vulnerable. Reckless Denis. His backstory provides a sliver of justification for the cruelty to which you must subject him. "He insists that he comes from a family of knights," it reads. "But he had nothing to prove his claims." A liar, then. And a boastful one at that. Fraudulent Denis.

First, I trap Denis in a bear snare. This serves two important purposes. Crucially, it makes a mockery of those Wellies. What kind of infantrymen wears Hunter boots to battle? One who doesn't read labels properly, I'd wager. Secondly, the bear trap pins him in place. Now I can take my time lining up a high-heeled kick to the groin. Kapow: this sends him reeling backwards to fall heavily into a bidet I've installed behind him. Before he's able to scrabble free of the pan, a spurt of water fountains him upwards. Airborne Denis! With expert timing, I loose a swinging axe, which strikes him mid-air, and knocks him straight into a stone pillar. As he slides mournfully to its base, I drop a hollowed pumpkin onto his head to finish him off. A knight, eh? Prove your claims, Denis.

There's no shortage of pitiful foils in Deception, a series that aims to stimulate every player's inner sadist. Later, you'll meet Nobu the Lackey, a dropout college athlete who's "never managed to clear the level four vaulting box" (those things come in levels?). Then Frances the Tearful, a crack archer who apologises "whenever anything happens." These comic characters pose little real threat to any of the devilish anime girls as whom you play in Deception 4: The Nightmare Princess. Rather, they act as foils for your cruel ingenuity. They are, like the cat's frantic mouse, prey to be toyed with.

It's one of the great mysteries of video gaming. How has the mighty Godzilla been able to inspire so many beloved interactive rip-offs - from Rampage to the sadly obscure War of the Monsters - without ever starring in a decent game of his own? It would be nice to report that this latest effort balances things out, and gives Big G his long overdue video game redemption, but despite some nice ideas it still falls painfully short.

The last time Godzilla stomped onto consoles was in a trilogy of sloppy fighting games in the 2000s. Those games focused on the monster-on-monster action to the exclusion of almost everything else, and suffered thanks to their lumpen controls and one-note gameplay. This new game still suffers from the same problems, but at least takes a swing at creating a broader tribute to the King of the Monsters.

The main game mode is God of Destruction, in which the idea is to guide Godzilla inland as he rampages through Japan in search of generators powered by "G-Energy". You chart his path across ten branching stages, made up of 25 areas. Sometimes you're able to choose between two different locations for your next attack, at other times there's only one way forwards.

Sega has joined the rest of the internet by inserting snippets of actor Shia LaBeouf's bats*** insane motivational speech into another video. In this case, LaBeouf inspires Sonic to "just do it" and kick Doctor Eggman's butt at the conclusion of Sonic Generations.

For the uninitiated, back in May LaBeouf offered one of the most nonsensical motivational speeches in history to the mischievous hands of the internet. Naturally, mankind took LaBeouf's baffling screams and turned it into a popular meme. The weird part is that this isn't just another fan edited offering, but is rather part of Sega's official Sonic the Hedgehog YouTube channel.

"We've just released a new (fictional) DLC for Sonic Generations that adds actual cannibal Shia Lebouf into one of the game's final cutscenes," Sega claimed in its YouTube notes.

UPDATE 4.25pm: Activision has now formally announced the Prototype bundle with a press release and a European date for the PS4 edition - which curiously won't be available until next Wednesday, 22nd July.

The Xbox One version is already available and has been since this morning.

Finally, Prototype and its sequel will eventually be available to buy separately - but not until 12th August. Until then, you'll have to buy both together if you want either one of the two.

The scene in question - seen in the trailer below - has Tom Cruise's special agent Ethan Hunt boarding a plane from the outside as it's taking off. When asked on Twitter how he came up with this scenario, McQuarrie stated "Group effort/Uncharted."

Uncharted 3 co-director Justin Richmond responded to this with "you just made my month."

Activision has released its debut trailer for Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 5.

This latest entry in the skateboarding franchise will feature 20-player simultaneous online multiplayer on current-gen consoles. The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions, however, will feature no online play whatsoever.

THPS5 also includes a level editor, so you can craft your own skate parks.

Fallout 3 wasn't a bad game - far from it - but its successor Fallout: New Vegas was most definitely better. This was a sequel that righted Fallout 3's few wrongs, setting players loose in a grittier, grimier, morally murkier nuclear wasteland, a world far removed from the Disneyland apocalypse of its predecessor, where the light side was zany and the dark side was only ever awful rather than crushingly bleak. New Vegas was more mature and morally challenging. It was also, depending on your personal feelings about the politics of the main factions, utterly chilling.

I'm talking about moments such as Caesar and his Legion. I hated these retrogressive, unnecessarily savage bellends from the moment I first saw them at Nipton, and I hated them because what they represented was genuinely scary. The Legion lifestyle seemed far more horrific than Eulogy Jones' little operation in Fallout 3. Slavery was just one of several ingredients in Caesar's awfulness cake.

Yet the set-up never seems overly sensational, or underscored with villainous cliche. When you meet Caesar, he's terrifyingly sane. His vision is clear, his actions informed by persuasive logic, but his idea of Roman standards of human rights becoming the dominant moral philosophy was repugnant. In 2015, given the shocking brutality in the Middle East, it feels scary in a far starker fashion. Swap the Mojave desert for that terrifying stretch of Syria and Iraq, and Fallout New Vegas becomes tragically prescient.